Motorists were taken over 40 miles off course.

We had a good run mocking iOS 6 maps for its wrong turns and bizarre aerial shots, but that's all over now that Australian police have actually deemed the app a danger to the public.

A statement on the Victoria police website has officially decreed Apple's contribution to the navigation world untrustworthy, after several users ended up 70km (about 43.4mi) off-course stranded in the wilderness and had to be rescued by police.

"Local police have been called to assist distressed motorists who have become stranded within the Murray-Sunset National Park after following directions on their Apple iPhone," reads the statement from the Mildura police department.

The bewildered travelers had been looking for Mildura, a rural city with a population of just 30,000. Imagine their surprise when they ended up in Murray Sunset National Park, a vast area of more than 6,000 square kilometers where the population is mainly made up of rare fauna and birds. Having found themselves 70 kilometers off-course in what the app said was downtown Mildura, the motorists were left without food and water, on some occasions, for up to 24 hours. Oblivious to the reason behind their predicament, they would walk miles further off course, away from their vehicles, looking for a phone signal.

Try and get directions between Mildura and the park on Google Maps, and the service won't even allow it, most likely because it doesn't want a lawsuit on its hands for sending unsuspecting members of the public into the bush solo.

Murray Sunset National Park, one of a vast network of parks near to Mildura, is a scenic spot famous for its Pink Lakes—so-called because of a red pigment that turns the waters dark pink in summer and white the rest of the year. It is, however, as police confirmed in their statement, not somewhere you'd like to get lost.

"Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees, making this a potentially life threatening issue."

The force has contacted Apple to ensure a correction is soon made and Mildura is repositioned, but in the meantime it's urging the public to rely on other mapping systems.

It's not the first time Apple's new mapping system has let a user down in an epic way that goes beyond its ordinary comical fails. According to a report by Gizmodo Australia, a Robert Hills looking for Brisbane Hospital was directed to a house in the suburbs. A site apology from CEO Tim Cook is probably not sufficient in cases such as these.

As someone who really dislikes Apple, I can't help but enjoy all the bad press they're getting for Maps. But, just to say, that this isn't exactly new to the world of reliably imperfect mapping data, and overly trusting drivers.

Apple should just remove it via software update and restore Google maps or an equivalent. There are lots of free map apps that are better. I don't know if Waze works outside the U.S., but it's what I use here.

I've posted lots of updates to the map app because it was supposed to be crowdsourced, but it's been months and still no fixes in my city. I moved the city arena to its proper location (currently pin is on county jail) and deleted all of the downtown gas stations that are really petroleum companies' office buildings.

It even has the downtown district names completely wrong. If you used Apple maps in my town, you would not find the 20,000 seat arena or the minor league baseball field. Directions to the airport would take you to a service road that meets the runway. It shows public schools that have been closed for decades as well as a few restaurants that only the old timers remember.

Waze is aware that some expressways are closed or diverted due to construction projects. Apple maps thinks it's smooth sailing right off that uncompleted overpass.

I have always double checked where I am going before there was even apps. Back in the days of web based yahoo maps and mapquest, I would cross check and even sometimes find real maps for confirmation. I've used google maps, waze, and the new iOS maps, each has had a few odd directions, but 99% of the time it is correct. People should have backup plans if there life may end up in danger, what if you lose your phone, runs out of battery, etc. Don't only rely on an app.

GPS is great, but going 40 miles off course without realizing it seems like a problem even the best GPS couldn't solve. I've never driven in Australia, and I realize much of it is the outback, but are roadsigns that scarce?

If you switch from car to walking or cycling mode Google does give you directions. My first thought was that part of the route was a hiking trail; but it looks like it's all roads so I'm not sure why the car option returns nothing. With it returning results in some cases I don't think liability concerns are the reason though.

It seems that if you find yourself lost in the wilderness because your GPS has obviously given you bad directions, that one would at least realize that and take steps to rectify the situation. Heak, if nothing else just tell the program to get reverse directions, go back home, and try again later, preferably with an atlas if you know your phone fails you.

"Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees, making this a potentially life threatening issue."

The first thing that went through my head was "That is not hot at all!" Then I realized I am from America, where we have a backwards temperature system from everywhere else. 46 degrees Celsius is roughly 115 degrees Fahrenheit. So a typical summer in Arizona, which is pretty hot.

Right, blame Apple because the data they bought itself is unreliable. Man, the first few years using Garmin I was sent on all manner of odd routes, Google maps itself in the past year has on multiple occasions told me to make uTurns where it;s illegal to do so, even when i could have just turned left 4 blocks earlier instead of driving past my destination to uturn and come back to it. Mapquest used to give me a rouse from my southern home to family back north that was a full 125miles longer trip through higher toll rates even when I specified no tolls (there are ways to get there that are quicker in both miles and time without tolls at all). The GPS in my car is a total PoS, not even knowing some roads in town that have been present for more than 10 years, while sending me down others (though the no dirt roads option is set) that have never, EVER been paved. On more than one occasion, it routed me down a driveway as opposed to a cross street, and has on several occasions instructed me to turn down a one-way street.

GPS is fallable. It will lead you well alongh a route, but whether or not its the correct route is something you need to validate manually. When I plot a route, I don't just accept the address and hit go, I check the map itself, reroute with alternate options, and try at least one alternate GPS application. I bother to zoom in on the destination, and when available, look at the sattelite imagery to confirm it's the right place. Sometime's it's not. I also have real paper maps as a backup, which in some cases finding small town in backwoods carolinas, is necessary. Garbage in garbage out, the system is only as reliable as the data. If they're not reporting the bad data, then who's going to fix it?

Clearly this location has been an issue for more than one map copmpany, which means the bad data is VERY old, and likely shared by one party long ago that was originally wrong, and yet they have not all universally corrected it. Is apple maps even "officially" supported in Australia? I know they have a list of nations where they have varying levels of support, from full 3D maps, down to basic roads only with no POIs.

As someone who really dislikes Apple, I can't help but enjoy all the bad press they're getting for Maps. But, just to say, that this isn't exactly new to the world of reliably imperfect mapping data, and overly trusting drivers.

This shouldn't be only about Apple. It should be about any map services provider's liability in case things go awry with their service. iOS6 and Apple's maps weren't even around when we first began seing coverage of drivers getting lost or having accidents for following GPS directions.

In my opinion there are 2 important aspects to this. One is that drivers should always be responsible for checking actual driving conditions. GPS can't be blamed if someone drives into a river or ditch, despite any instructions. A Nokia phone I used to have once told me to "make a sharp left" on an overpass in order to take the highway under it. If I'd driven into the wall, I should be the only one to blame.

A different matter is accuracy of instructions in general. If you find yourself desperately lost in the wilderness with no fuel or communications due to wrong directions, then I admit the map provider should have *some* liability, provided you can show you took reasonable care (e.g. full tank of gas, etc.).

zelannii wrote:

Right, blame Apple because the data they bought itself is unreliable.

Sorry, no cigar. Apple is the company providing the service. If any liability attaches to the incorrect map data, the consumer should be compensated by Apple. They're big boys, let them handle issues of liability with their third party providers.

But seriously, if you're going somewhere where there's a chance of no cell phone coverage, don't rely on cloud-based maps period. Always have a backup.

They weren't going somewhere where there was no coverage. They were led to somewhere where there was no coverage. Imagine someone going to visit a friend in the city, completely unprepared for a stay in the wilderness, ending up in the wilderness without cell phone coverage because they trusted a bad app. *That's* the situation here.

Apple should just remove it via software update and restore Google maps or an equivalent. There are lots of free map apps that are better. I don't know if Waze works outside the U.S., but it's what I use here.

I've posted lots of updates to the map app because it was supposed to be crowdsourced, but it's been months and still no fixes in my city. I moved the city arena to its proper location (currently pin is on county jail) and deleted all of the downtown gas stations that are really petroleum companies' office buildings.

It even has the downtown district names completely wrong. If you used Apple maps in my town, you would not find the 20,000 seat arena or the minor league baseball field. Directions to the airport would take you to a service road that meets the runway. It shows public schools that have been closed for decades as well as a few restaurants that only the old timers remember.

Waze is aware that some expressways are closed or diverted due to construction projects. Apple maps thinks it's smooth sailing right off that uncompleted overpass.

In my city, I prefer Waze of Apple maps. Google maps is near useless. We have a smattering of both a large number of zip codes, 3 county lines, and an older system of using "region" names for addresses that's still in practice in some places instead of the city name. For example, there are some places in town that even with the right address including zip code, google maps will route you to the wrong one, or claim address not found. Google is looking for the region, not the actuall address in many of these cases, but if all you know is the address and not the area, google will not lead you to it. We also have a town in 2 different places in the same state, 45 miles apart, and often Google will provide routing to the wrong one, even though they have unique zip codes, and oftehn the only way to use google successfully is to type the street address + zip and leave out the city name completely, or you can easily find yourself wasting a lot of gas and time. If you type the address and city into google without the zip, you'll often only get 1-2 responses, though that address may exist in 5-7 zip codes here locally, and apple maps will correctly list them all, as will waze.

Still, I check at LEAST 2 GPS systems everytime I'm headed to a location I do not know well. They are simply untrustworthy.

Google maps itself in the past year has on multiple occasions told me to make uTurns where it;s illegal to do so

There is a difference between telling somebody to do an illegal u-turn and sending him to the wilderness in a national park when he wants to go to a decent sized city. Just a question of proportionality.

The article doesn't say how often it happened but if it happens often enough to warrant an official statement by the authorities makes you realize that the maps really suck. (At least outside of the United States)

Apple just isn't good at the whole cloud services thing Google and Nokia have been at this for years and years. Perhaps Apple should have partnered with Nokia instead of trying to piece the stuff together itself.

I am a huge fan-boy but I am getting frustrated with maps. A few errors that I found early on were fixed, like the inability to correctly parse an address for a stored contact when it was explicit. For example, a contact with 500 Main Parkway stored would show you an approximate location but change it to 500 main Pkwy and it would give you the exact address. They fixed this. However big things have gone unfixed like the entire airport is missing in Pensacola, FL. I have filed dozens of "Report a Problem"s and even called in to Apple Care hoping that talking to a person would fix it. Still nothing since iOS 6 launch. I hope they speed at which this stuff fixes in the system improves.

How much of this is the fault of Apple, and how much if this is the fault of whoever provides Apple with the mapping data (TomTom)?

If the mapping data is bad, the app will give bad directions.Garbage in, garbage out, as the old computer saying goes.

I have iOS 6 on my phone, and three recent tests were:

* At home, I searched for my nearest petrol station. There is one three streets away. Apple Maps didn't know it was there, instead gave me 3 different places (all were small convenience stores, none of which sold petrol)

* At my local gym - which is part of a chain with ~30 branches - I searced for the business itself i.e. the brand of gym. I was stood in front of the building itself, but Apple Maps told me the nearest one was 30 miles away

* Yesterday I went for a wall on the beach at Formby (in the UK). When I was there, I searched for Formby - as in the place I was at that moment. It's not a small place, it has a train station etc. Apple Maps told me the only place with that name is 150 miles away.

Sure, Apple Maps makes some bad choices - colours of roads for example, that do not conform with the decades old established format - but how much of this is the problem of bad data?

So a map priovider has to personally verify every single street and direction provided by their service, even though they subcontracted that information? Explain to me how it would be then possible for ANY new company to ever affordably offer a map product ever again if they are smoehow beholden to drive every single street and confirm it?

This isn't exactly new. If a component in a phone battery causes the battery to explode and injures a person, the person doesn't (and shouldn't) give a rat's ass about who made the battery. All that matters is who sold the phone.

Apple can easily negotiate terms under which, if faulty data causes it to be held responsible for damages, the data provider will cover its liability. Google "back-to-back". If the provider won't accept it, you probably should skip it anyway.

They weren't going somewhere where there was no coverage. They were led to somewhere where there was no coverage. Imagine someone going to visit a friend in the city, completely unprepared for a stay in the wilderness, ending up in the wilderness without cell phone coverage because they trusted a bad app. *That's* the situation here.

Doesn't the fact that you are in the wilderness 40 miles off course alert you to the fact that maybe you're off course? Are people allergic to simply turning around?

Google maps itself in the past year has on multiple occasions told me to make uTurns where it;s illegal to do so

There is a difference between telling somebody to do an illegal u-turn and sending him to the wilderness in a national park when he wants to go to a decent sized city. Just a question of proportionality.

The article doesn't say how often it happened but if it happens often enough to warrant an official statement by the authorities makes you realize that the maps really suck. (At least outside of the United States)

Apple just isn't good at the whole cloud services thing Google and Nokia have been at this for years and years. Perhaps Apple should have partnered with Nokia instead of trying to piece the stuff together itself.

Google gave me instructionsa in Texas a couple years ago that included 5 uTurns and a 4.5 mile drive to get to a destination 4 blocks away on the same street to which the real driving rigections were "leave driveway right, go 4 blocks, turn left into your destination". Google has also had me get off a freeway onto a side road to GET RIGHT BACK ON and keep going straight, and on several occasions directed me off a highway onto another one, just to uturn and get back on the original freeway, all just because someone didn;t input a map junction properly.

Also, in my notes, i indicated how you could easily evnd up 45 miles from your expected desination in my state with Google maps, ending up in the wrong place with the wrong zip code, even though you EXPLICITY entered the right zip code, and the street you;'re going to does not even exist in that other town. 2 towns, same name, same state. (google provides approxamte location of 1204 main street in that town here, but the 1204 main street in the town of the same name is 45 minutes away. that other version of the town has 1 gas station that is not open on Sundays, and if you arrive there with less than 25 miles remaining in your tank on the wrong day of the week, you'll be stranded, as that's the closest gas station to this rural location. The road there is a 4 lane highway, not exactly a back road you might mistake for bad directions. Again, even if you enter the correct zip code, google still places the target marker in near dead center of the town 40 miles off with a totally different zip code, it is simply an error in their maps (and ALSO an error in the GPS system used in many Chrystlers). Apple gets it right in their new maps, as do Waze, mapquest, and Garmin. Same issue downtown (city center), where google will only show you 1 or 2 options after entering an address, because it is not universally using the postal address, but still relying on older (28 YEARS older) information from when each part of town used a differing name based on the community/suburb, and if you don;t know and enter THAT name, google won;t find the address, so you might inadvertantly pick one of the 2 it gives you, or accept the only one it does, and end up though maybe only 10 miles off, half an hour difference easily from your destination).

Doesn't the fact that you are in the wilderness 40 miles off course alert you to the fact that maybe you're off course? Are people allergic to simply turning around?

If you don't know where you're going in unfamiliar territory, it's hard to know just how off course you are. And after driving a very long way, it's understandable that people would be reluctant to abandon the journey and drive all the way back. The gadget's map says they're close, so they want to believe that driving just a bit farther will get them there.

So a map priovider has to personally verify every single street and direction provided by their service, even though they subcontracted that information? Explain to me how it would be then possible for ANY new company to ever affordably offer a map product ever again if they are smoehow beholden to drive every single street and confirm it?

This isn't exactly new. If a component in a phone battery causes the battery to explode and injures a person, the person doesn't (and shouldn't) give a rat's ass about who made the battery. All that matters is who sold the phone.

Apple can easily negotiate terms under which, if faulty data causes it to be held responsible for damages, the data provider will cover its liability. Google "back-to-back". If the provider won't accept it, you probably should skip it anyway.

Actually, no. Although Apple initially handles and investigates the issues, when the issue has been exploding Sony batteries (old macbooks), SONY was sued, not apple, and SONY paid all damaes and warranty claims for replaced batteries, Apple merely facilitated.

Contractual culpability for faults in provided goods for resale typically lies in the company that sourced the good, not the company that sold it. If a grocery store has a bad batch of produce, they pull it from the shelves, but the farm pays the medical bills for those who were sick once it;s determined to be an issue in their processing.

Apple maps is just a UI interface to someone ELSE'S data. This is actually spelled out in the terms of service noone reads. Liability is passed through. Its just that the press, and the trolls, are choosing to ignore this "minor" detail.

When I go to a weird place, like in Europe or wherever. I usually get an overview of where we are going and how we are getting there. I just don't trust anything, I zoom out from where I am going to and see what it looks like. If you zoomed out of the map in the middle of the nature park you know something is wrong, it was suppose to be a city with streets, if you are expecting a centre of town and there are no lights coming up and no service stations, think a little. Let's say you blindly follow and you are now 40 miles off course from where you are, and lets say you couldn't zoom out, you can still follow the line you came there on, go back the way you came. Who walks out of their car and walks for miles in search of streets when obviously there is none? Enough said.

The lesson here is one that's been repeated often in the last 20 or so years:

"GPS is not primary navigation".

At least not until you get well beyond consumer level stuff and into certificated systems that are permanently installed in things like aircraft. And even then, there are always backups.

While it's easy to point the finger at Apple and their map service here, the primary fault in this case lies entirely with the end user. Heading off on a trip in populated areas using GPS as your only guide is ill-advised. Doing so when wandering off course could very likely result in death is beyond stupid.

Beyond that, the fact that they apparently didn't pack basic supplies like food and water was a mistake as well. The American west isn't nearly as harsh as the Outback, but I know around places like Las Vegas just about everyone carries extra water in their cars on the off chance they get stranded on a highway in the desert for several hours.

Just because you can get basic GPS guidance someplace doesn't mean you are free to dive in completely oblivious and unprepared. Know your destination, know and review the basic route before departing, know and prepare for the environment you're heading into, and always, always have a backup.

I was in a taxi in Amsterdam and the GPS in the taxi had him going around in circles, when the place I was staying was just on the corner and it couldn't figure it out and had the taxi going around a few blocks over and over. The taxi driver was just following it around the block, after a couple times, I told him to let me out where my place was, even though I had never been there I could figure something wasn't right. But the taxi driver was obliviously just following along.

Apple should just remove it via software update and restore Google maps or an equivalent. There are lots of free map apps that are better. I don't know if Waze works outside the U.S., but it's what I use here.

I've posted lots of updates to the map app because it was supposed to be crowdsourced, but it's been months and still no fixes in my city. I moved the city arena to its proper location (currently pin is on county jail) and deleted all of the downtown gas stations that are really petroleum companies' office buildings.

It even has the downtown district names completely wrong. If you used Apple maps in my town, you would not find the 20,000 seat arena or the minor league baseball field. Directions to the airport would take you to a service road that meets the runway. It shows public schools that have been closed for decades as well as a few restaurants that only the old timers remember.

Waze is aware that some expressways are closed or diverted due to construction projects. Apple maps thinks it's smooth sailing right off that uncompleted overpass.

[off topic]:Apparently some people read your sensible, non-hostile, helpfully critical post and downvoted it. Have an upvote, and a request for a new keyboard after the last sentence.

From a slightly different perspective, Apple Maps has become a safety and security issue for me as well.

I travel to different countries frequently for work. It used to be with Google maps, I could type in POIs in almost any decent sized city all over Asia and Africa and generally have it show up in the right spot. Taking a taxi, I could always verify that at least the driver was moving in the right direction towards the hotel, hospital, shopping center, etc.

With Apple Maps, my destination is likely to not show in the first place and even if it does, it's in the wrong spot.

I've been using iPhones for five years, since the original first gen phone. It's time for me to upgrade my phone and for this reason and this reason alone, I can't go with the iPhone 5.

I've had this conversation with many an international traveller in airports and hotel bars. iOS maps is a resounding failure for anyone who does a significant amount of international travel.

They say confidence builds confidence. These days more people go where they aren't prepared to go, thinking their devices will save them. Most of us are far removed from "roughing it," much less "Oregon Trail" style survival mode. Believe it or not, there is still wilderness out there, where it's not all bunnies and double rainbows.